Page 2 of Rook

Which brings us to Dante.

He is the one you have not been watching closely enough.

Everyone misses Dante. That is his design. He has been building that invisibility since he was old enough to understand that the safest place in Giovanni's house was the place no one remembered to look.

Giovanni's eldest son carries his authority. His middle son carries his charm.

Dante carries his mind.

He reads a room the way a surgeon reads a body. By the time you realize what he actually is, you are already three moves behind. Giovanni never saw it. Giovanni was too busy breaking the loud sons to notice the quiet one was learning everything.

That mind is what makes Dante lethal.

And that mind is what someone used against him.

Because here is what happened—and this is the part they will get wrong.

Dante was not overpowered.

Dante was not outsmarted.

Dante was betrayed by his own mercy.

He saw a flaw in the night's security. He had the calculation to override it. And he set it aside—because the man his brother was becoming deserved one single night of peace.

Giovanni would have called that weakness.

I call it the first time a Rivas son chose love over strategy, and paid the full price for it.

Because someone was counting on that mercy.

The Mole.

The traitor embedded in the walls who bypassed Fabio's systems and walked through impenetrable security. They used Dante's one moment of mercy to deliver him—chained, bleeding, concussed—to a concrete room with no windows and no doors he could reach.

To Isadora.

I will not tell you what happens next. Some stories demand to be lived from within.

But I will tell you this.

Santino is no longer a priest. He walks beside Pia now, a woman who crawled out of the dark and chose to stay in the light with a man who is still learning what the light looks like. They are the family's edge. Its blade.

Romeo is a father now, or he will be. A secret that changes the mathematics of every decision he makes from this moment forward.

And Guido. My son.

He is not the boy I sent back to his brothers. He watches now the way a man watches—not to hide, but to prepare.

And there is a girl. Somewhere in the margins of all of this. Protected, distant, kept separate from the blood and the empire by a father who spent her entire life making sure the world never touches her.

He will not succeed.

The world always finds them. It found me. It found Pia. It found Nova.

It will find her.

But that story is not for today.